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The recovery from 2012’s Hurricane Sandy has been slow for some in New Jersey, especially the underprivileged. Misión Nueva Vida has worked since 2015 to help those in the Metropolitan Mobile Home Park (Metropark) in Moonachie, where floodwaters continue to damage the homes of mostly Hispanic-Latino immigrant families, and a lack of money is rampant. Three trailers have been repaired and raised, and a fourth will soon be completed.
The recovery from Superstorm Sandy has been slow for some in New Jersey, especially the underprivileged. Misión Nueva Vida has worked since 2015 to help those in the Metropolitan Mobile Home Park (Metropark) in Moonachie.
If there is a revered profession in my family, it is a life given to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church. In 1884, my great-grandfather J. Vernon Bell began his ministry as pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Dubois, Pennsylvania, almost 100 years to the day that I entered Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
In this year in which we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, we also mark 180 years of Presbyterian mission abroad. During these years, much of the nature of mission and of how Presbyterians think about mission has changed or, at the very least, been supplemented or clarified by new ideas.
One day, while taking a break from studying in the Duke Divinity School library, I got into a conversation that would change the course of my family’s life. As I talked with a stranger, I learned he was the only person in the world with a Ph.D. in New Testament, which is also my field of study, who could speak the particular language of the country where he was training Christians for ministry. This really struck me.
Presbyterians do mission as partnership. They listen to, learn from and support Christians and their ministries around the world.
Released in movie theaters in April, ‘The Promise’ is no mere period love story but a ‘fight to end genocide and injustice,’ promoters say. Actor Christian Bale plays an American journalist trying to expose the Ottoman plot to exterminate millions of Armenians.
Presbyterian mission co-workers Bob and Kristi Rice have accepted a call to serve in South Sudan after six years in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
New Castle Presbytery looked to its roots during an especially difficult time of church dismissals. However, by remembering where it came from while looking to the future, the presbytery better understood its calling.
My call to mission is the result of mission work, mission schools, theological education and the rooting of the Protestant Reformation in Latin America where, since the 15th century, the largest numbers of historically and culturally Roman Catholics have lived. Ours is a religiously pluralistic region where popular religions—and now the fastest growing “nondenominational” Christian movements in the world—coexist with leading theologies of the future and with Christian theologies many centuries old.
